vlad.tribnet.com / Issue #529 / Crime watch / Reading article...

The military court of Primorye’s city of Nakhodka has sentenced a young conscript who deserted a military unit in western Russia and spent several months traveling a distance of about 10,000 kilometers to his home city to 1.5-years imprisonment. The soldier claimed he escaped from the unit due to hazing.

The runaway, identified only as Alexander K., said at the trial that his escape from the unit was the result of being consistently humiliated and beaten by his fellow servicemen.

Alexander, who was drafted by Nakhodka’s military draft board in December 2004, was to spend about half a year in a unit in the training center of Krasnodar Military College’s studying encryption skills. Then he was to be sent to continue his military service in Primorye. However, the conscript fled the unit, which was considered elite, just two months before being sent back to the Primorye area.

After receiving a call from Krasnodar revealing that Alexander escaped from the unit and was missing, the soldier’s grandmother and father arrived in Krasnodar to ascertain details regarding the incident. However, they did not receive any definitive information from the unit commanders.

After several months, the conscript finally arrived to Nakhodka exhausted and depressed after traveling a long distance across the country. According to Alexander, during the first month he made his way to the city of Rostov, with no documents, money or food. Then he arrived in Moscow and finally headed for Nakhodka, traveling by freight trains and hitchhiking.

In January 2006, he voluntary appeared at Nakhodka’s Prosecutor’s Office admitting he escaped from the unit.

According to Alexander, a group of the unit conscripts started to persistently beat him after an incident wherein he and his fellow recruit failed to bring the ordering conscripts bottles of beer. The abusers, who included an older conscript and several younger ones, also humiliated him by demanding money and even threatening him with a knife, Alexander revealed at the trial.

Alexander, who is rendered by his relatives as a quiet, calm and non-confrontational person, said he was scared to report his fellow soldiers’ hazing to the commandment. As it turned out, the newly drafted conscripts were never instructed on what action they should take in case of hazing.

The trial was much hampered by the absence of witnesses required from Krasnodar, with only one teacher from the unit training center present at the process. The other witnesses’ evidence, which was sent from Krasnodar’s Military Prosecutor’s Office, stated they did not see anything nor they were involved in beating the serviceman.

According to the court verdict, Alexander is charged with leaving a unit for more than a month, which qualifies as desertion.

Alexander’s case, which is not uncommon in Russia’s army, is one of those facts about violence in the Russian Army which have appeared in mass media after public concern was struck by the tragedy in a Chelyabinsk unit, when conscript Andrei Sychyov was severely beaten by drunk soldiers on New Year's Eve of 2006. The soldier, who was left without medical attention for three days, had to have his legs and genitals amputated due to gangrene.

According to Chief Military Prosecutor Alexander Savenkov, 6,000 soldiers had been injured in hazing cases in 2005, and that increasing attention by military prosecutors had led to 2,609 convictions.